Chris Thompson, Ph. D., director of research and evaluation, BoardSource

Chris Thompson, Ph. D., director of research and evaluation, BoardSource
Chris Thompson, Ph.D. Director of Research and Evaluation Chris Thompson oversees BoardSource’s research, evaluation, and assessment initiatives. These include Leading with Intent: A National Index of Nonprofit Board Practices (formerly called the BoardSource Governance Index), which is conducted every other year, and the BSA (Board Self-Assessment) suite of tools, reports, and services. Before joining the BoardSource team in 2014, Chris was director of research at three major Washington, D.C.-based national nonprofit member associations and conducted research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s LaFollette Institute for Public Affairs and the John Hopkins Institute for Policy Studies. He had degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Cambridge and University College London in the U.K.

Reassuring level of knowledge revealed by nonprofit financial literacy quiz

Chris Thompson, BoardSource’s numbers guy (and experienced ATM user) explores what can be learned from our recent financial literacy quiz.

Of the 10 basic board responsibilities, “finance” appears prominently in two of them: “ensuring adequate financial resources” and “protecting assets and...

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Topics: financial oversight

Leading with Intent Comes of Age: A glimpse at what 21 years of change in nonprofit governance looks like

In 1994, Amazon was launched, the infamous Lorena Bobbitt went on trial and was found temporarily insane, Michael Jackson married Elvis’s daughter, and Howard Stern ran for governor of New York. Given such momentous cultural milestones, it is hardly surprising that the first-ever BoardSource...

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Topics: Leading with Intent

Economy Continues to Dominate Concerns of Nonprofit Leaders in 2016

Which general areas do you think will, or should, concern nonprofit boards the most in 2016? In a “pulse” survey recently conducted by BoardSource and the Nonprofit Quarterly, “General economic uncertainty, increased volatility, and shocks” was identified as the main concern. This issue was one of...

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Topics: Leading with Intent

Form 990 — A Guide for Newcomers to Nonprofit Research

BoardSource’s director of research and evaluation suggests how nonprofit research newcomers and students can best wrestle this beast to the ground and extract value (without too many scars that you wouldn’t want to show around the office).

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Topics: Research, Form 990

Got Vizzies? 10 tips for nonprofit chief executives considering the dynamic visualization corner of the “Big Data” world.

Like many nonprofits, BoardSource strives to keep up with the rapidly-evolving world of Big Data, both to increase our own data-based decision-making for continuous improvement internally and to deliver more value to our external community. Recently, this ongoing process has resulted in me becoming...

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Topics: Data Visualization, Dashboard, Mission Impact

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